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Lecture capture - doing it well and at scale

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Last updated 28/7/2011

This is a one day event run by the Association for Learning Technology about lecture capture and how to do it well and at scale. You will find below links to recordings of each session made using Adobe Connect. [Important note: ALT was piloting its use of Adobe Connect during the conference. All of the recordings are of at least adequate quality, but there is room for improvement in several of them.]

Many organisations are turning to recording lectures and other kinds of teaching session, and publishing these internally or externally so that students and others can access the recordings at their leisure.

“Lecture Capture” is the awkward name for the family of technologies that support the making of such recordings. The aim of this ALT event is to help participants get to grips with the human, organisational, pedagogic, quality and technical challenges of doing lecture capture well and at scale.

The tag for the event is #altlc (changed from #alt_lc).

Programme

The event is expected to have the following programme and we will be confirming further details about the sessions and the exhibitors over the coming weeks.

At QMUL we are now leaving our pilot phase and entering a larger scale production environment. We've learned lessons about the technology, about the law and about how people feel when a camera appears in a space hitherto sacrosanct.

An unexpected outcome of wide-scale lecture capture has been exposure, both deep and wide, across the university of gaps in provision and practice. Eoin McDonnell will speak about Queen Mary's experience of discovering those gaps and what happens when they are brought to light.

Like many educational technology developments, lecture capture started at LSE as an ad hoc response to a request from a single lecturer - in this case to record some ‘optional’ maths lectures. We quickly realised that our early efforts would not scale up, so started to look for other options.

We were fortunate that solutions started to appear on the market at just the right time and a limited labour intensive recording programme developed into a campuswide automated recording system that some students might now regard as 'mission-critical'. I will look at some of the problems we encountered and how they were addressed along with staff and student attitudes to lecture capture at LSE

A key issue to carry out massive digital lectures recordings is to automate as much as possible the production and post-production processes to pull down all the costs.

The EyA and OpenEyA systems developed at ICTP (Trieste, Italy) allow to archive and share traditional lectures and talks carried out using, e.g., very large chalkboards found in classrooms and/or using modern presentations (PPT, PDF, animations, etc). We will present the system architecture and our experience in recording scientific lectures for the last four years. http://www.ictp.tv/

This project is to use technology to enhance learning and teaching. This is achieved through the provision of audio and video recordings of teaching sessions given by academic colleagues within the Chemistry Department. Provision of the recordings has benefits to both staff and students. It is believed that there is no barrier to the practical aspects of the project - thus the project is to bring about a transformative change such that at least 10 academic colleagues from within the department will provide recordings of their teaching sessions to students. This project has had the backing of the Higher Education Academy Discipline-focused Learning Technology Enhancement Academy (DfLTEA).

Progress, achievements, issues, student and staff feedback from the project together with experiences of the DfLTEA will be described and future directions outlined.

The project has several associated web pages describing aspects of the project:

The very simplicity of lecture capture technology has tended to render staff development and support needs invisible. Our research has, however, highlighted a number of practical and conceptual issues and questions encountered by academics, managers and support staff. We will outline the range of issues and discuss how staff development has been a mechanism both to surface these issues and respond appropriately to them.

There is no doubt that lecture capture is a very significant learning technology and hugely popular with students. But does it just support or even encourage a traditional and outmoded pedagogy? Or could it actually lead to more open and social forms of learning design? In this discussion we will begin to explore the pedagogical issues surrounding lecture capture including ‘active’ patterns of student usage, mobile delivery and the potential of feedback and social commenting.

Copyright law can seem daunting and confusing, yet many of us supporting lecture recording may find ourselves having to give advice and help formulate Institutional policies on this despite being non-experts. This session aims to summarise the key issues and provide practical and pragmatic answers to questions you may have.

If you have any specific queries you would like to address, please email them to Graham McElearneyby Monday 6th June.